Winter 2022/23
different ways to describe the ends of things
notes on Laurie Anderson
It Shall Not Be Named – Carlos Motta: Your Monsters, Our Idols
Passenger—Migration Patterns on the Living and Those of the Dead
Millions of dead birds follow such new migratory paths, which draw capital from the south and the east into the north and the west. Often, these paths consolidate, convene in the centers of the colonizing empires—London and Paris—for a few years, or decades, before moving on to museums in the new world. These routes are not the birds’ natural flyways. They are new paths toward a capitalist archive that usurps purpose from the world it exploits.
Cornell Labs Panama Fruit Feeder Cam at Canopy Lodge
The Fruit Feeder can be viewed as a kind of durational performance art. Its participants may be unaware of their roles, but they perform their daily dramas nevertheless. Fights between peckish birds over the best bit of mango or the prime perch on a branch often rattle the otherwise tranquil setting. The overwhelming growth and decay of the surrounding forest and the exhausting, relentless tussle between life and death infuse the scene with a kind of madness
Liv Bugge: The Consequence of Touching Oil
“What is the consequence of touching oil—of coming to know it in an embodied sense? What gets destabilized when oil slips out of the category of the inhuman, even momentarily? To make an image with the body requires revaluation of the discursive function of touch. I propose that Bugge’s document of people touching oil and becoming aware of its aliveness, its animateness, awakens those people to the violent relationship humans have not only with oil, but also with the world beings that humans broadly consider inanimate.”
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
Korakrit Arunanondchai and Alex Gvojic: PRAY
Monira Al Qadiri: Refined Vision
Whereas fossil fuel exploration happens on a global scale, Al Qadiri zeroes in on extraction and refinement, which are much more visible at ground level in certain regions of the world. This exhibition drew a nuanced connection between the Persian Gulf region and the Texas Gulf Coast (although not noted in the exhibition information, the processing infrastructure of the latter region certainly extends into southern Louisiana).